The Lambertville record. [volume] (Lambertville, N.J.) 1872-1968, 1887-06-01

divide nations and States into manifold con-
Trajectory religions, and to diversity society
with sacerdotal classes and add to it pageant
like funerals, monument raisings and martyr
doms
War is the great game of hazard between
life and death. -,
Therein man, for the evanescent principles
OF patriotism or control, offers his life tran
gully or passionately up to death and ceases
TO be, that his people or views may continue
to be.
War is, therefore, the biggest dignity OF
life, absorbing the admiration of all other
distinctions, religion included The impress
siveness of death is not equal to the impress
siveness Of the courage which considers il a
trifle compared with weak or ignominious
living.
The prize or penalty of death can only be
postponed by the eowardly and the prudent;
to them, as to the brave and rash, it is an
evanescent reprieve. Not even relinquishine
war would save human society from dying
simultaneously by pest, famine or earth
quake. The components of our breath and
food are SO delicately mixed of elixir and
poison that the extinction of the race and of
creation itself grows simpler as a proposition
to the naturalist than to the theologian.
AT the brink of the American Revolution
the idea first burst upon the discoverer of
oxygen that animal life was limited to the
supply of oxygen from vegetable life, and
that all vegetable life depended upon the
lungs of animal life for the carbon which
created tree, leaf and grass.
Thus correlative, dependent, suspended be-
tween energy and humiliation, life has the
buoyancy and forgetfulness of its own sell
fishncss, preferring this moment to any
other, yet in its intellectual purposes stalking
life ITSELF with the probabilities of pain, cap
tivity, disease and mutilation.
Much has been written in all ages upon the
moral superiority of submitting to that of
resisting and conquering, but the trump of
war meyer fails to summon all conditions
and the tribunal of war often alters the
whole personality of history.
The earliest poem of Europe has the theme
of war; the master men of the present age
emerged from warfare; the Oldest monarch
in Europe went to war in his boyhood, and
by war crowned his hoary age with Caesars
circlet.
The man who stole France kept his
plumber till he was forced into foreign war,
and then he lost it all. His son chose for
the field of glory poor obscure and dis
tant foe, and so the dynasty of Napoleon
persisted on a negro's spear. Juarez and
Diaz in Mexico, Wolseley and Sheridan, Grant
and Won Moltke, Lincoln and Disraeli else
where arose or confirmed their flames by
war-like hazard.
War, indeed, is the best thing to divinein-
terposition in the adjustment Of races and
periods; all other forms of change are slow
and uncertain, but the arbitrament of battle
has the CELEBRITY ofthe oracle and the thunder
bolt.
We saw in one day the crown of Germany
pass from the family which had held it five
hundred years. In another day we saw eleven
hundred years of Moslem rule on the Medi-
terranean brought to full stop and the Rus
sian lances only retire from Constantinople
at the interference OF Hebrew politician.
During the past hundred years small
Anglo-Saxon state has reduced the vast en-
pire of the Mogul to an industrial factory,
invaded Africa by both the Niger and the Nile,
attacked China, annexed Burmah, absorbed
nearly every new island in Polynesia, and
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Gibraltar and at Suez.
In the same century Poland has disap-
peared, Hungary recovered independence
the Hessian and Hanoverian princes have
been dethroned, Sweden and Denmark have
been reduced, Italy has become an empire,
Spain has been colonially dismembered.
Historians will attemptto see other causes
for these changes than military discipline or
inferiority, but those who live abreast Of
great wars generally believe that the victor
had the superior system and people and
that his state was the best prepared
for war because its living principles were the
soundest.
The loveofliberty expressed by the greatest
loyalty is what every large modern state aims
to exemplify. England, Germany. America,
are supreme instances Of this devotion attain
ing imperial results
England has expanded everywhere and
policed the globe; Germany has given
Europe more just distribution of parts and
people; America has preserved the new